[CentOS] Lost Samba GUI interface

Sun Jan 7 20:59:32 UTC 2007
John Summerfield <debian at herakles.homelinux.org>

Les Mikesell wrote:
> John Summerfield wrote:
> 
>>> Your best bet is to learn how to edit that file (/etc/samba/smb.conf) by
>>> hand.
>>>
>>> You can test the file for errors with this command (as root) from the
>>> command line:
>>
>>
>> I think Johnny's comments apply to several of the RH configuration 
>> tools. They're fairly basic and seem to me to be present just so that 
>> some beancounter can check a box, "Got that: [X]." I have over 20 
>> system-config-* tools installed; only one (system-config-network) 
>> seems useful, and the TUI version of that's broken. The LVM and 
>> SELinux tools might be useful, I've never had their need.
> 
> 
> I think webmin is a better approach if you don't want to edit
> the files directly, but I haven't used that much either.  What
> I'd really like to see is just a syntax checker for every config
> file and a scheme to automatically run it *before* killing the
> service that won't restart with the bad file.  Webmin is only
> so-so at helping you make changes - you basically have to
> understand all the choices anyway, but it does keep you from
> making stupid typo's like you can in a text editor or things
> like putting #'s instead of ;'s as comments in a dns zone file.

I've used webmin too, but don't like it much.

The best I've seen for Linux doesn't apply to RH systesm; it's SUSE' 
YAST which installs and configures everything, and if you try to 
configure something that's not installed, it will offer to install it 
for you. It has some bugs, and I managed to injure my LDAP config with 
it, but it makes a decent effort at covering everything.

Probably the best I've seen is Apple's tools, Workstation Manager and 
User Manager I think they're called, for configuring its servers. One 
uses the same tools locally or remotely, including over a VPN. Against 
them is that they don't try to do everything - I don't recall anything 
to configure oss such as Apache (but LDAP is convered). On buying a book 
I found they're basically GUI wrappers for command-line tools, so I can 
sit at my CentOS VI box typing at Big Mac.

For Printers, _I_ use CUPS itself, the web interface is fairly usable & 
works from anywhere you can address the CUPS server, and again there are 
command-line tools to control stuff. The CUPS in RHEL5 even seems to 
have hardware autodetection.

Set CUPS to browse (I generally use vim for this if it's not already 
done) and it automatically finds all CUPS printers on the LAN, and I 
pointed one CUPS server at CUPS at work (via a VPN) and I could 
instantly print on printers at the office from all machines.

For SAMBA there's SWAT which, as it comes from samba.org, should be 
complete, but I use SAMBA so rarely I really coulnd't say. gvim's my 
usual gui here:-)




-- 

Cheers
John

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